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Word: sams (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
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Usage:

...GOODBYE TO SAM...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Battleground | 10/8/1984 | See Source »

...glory enhanced them. That psychic battleground is toured by Michael J. Arlen, 53, a journalist, memoirist and television critic of The New Yorker, yet seemingly fated to be known always as the son of the celebrated '20s novelist Michael Arlen (The Green Hat). Say Goodbye to Sam is told in the first person, and much of its detail is so close to Arlen's life that it is tempting to read the book as therapy or revenge. But it works, elegiacally and sometimes forcefully, as fiction...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Battleground | 10/8/1984 | See Source »

...Avery, the narrator of the novel, has embarked upon a second marriage, to a younger woman. On the sort of momentary impulse that springs from a lifelong yearning, he decides to take her to New Mexico to meet his father, Sam Avery, a semiretired film director with a gift for popular appeal. The son has won critical success for his magazine articles and books (which Arlen slyly depicts as exhaustive looks at narrow topics, resembling less his own work than that of his New Yorker colleague John McPhee); he is too constrained, too inward looking, to write...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Battleground | 10/8/1984 | See Source »

Most of Tom's filial anxiety is expressed in petulant silences, terse complaints or brooding bedroom confidences to his wife. The dominant mood of the story is foreboding, not confrontation. Arlen enlarges the narrative with flashbacks, precise observations of the Southwestern landscape, persuasively detailed descriptions of scenes from Sam's imaginary film classics. He keeps the conflict from becoming one-sided by displaying Sam's abrupt charms and convincing manifestations of primitive genius: a ruthless urge to simplify, instantaneous judgment about character, a capacity for total absorption coupled with the short attention span of a child. Sam...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Battleground | 10/8/1984 | See Source »

...turns frantic. In the culmination of a night of frenzied incident, the father is shot and gravely wounded by a romantic rival, and the aggrieved son abruptly turns prayerful. Arlen rescues the novel from pathos with the scene he seems to have had in mind all along: a recovering Sam and Tom talk of their differences only to reaffirm them. Not even a brush with violent death will bring the older man to guilt and confession, or the younger one to recognize that a child's claim on a parent may be something less than absolute. The dialogue, believable...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Battleground | 10/8/1984 | See Source »

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